Silent Crown: The Masked Prince's Bride-Chapter 322: A Vision

After that, without warning, without even the whisper of displaced air, Vaeronyx vanished into the night, leaving Leroy standing beneath the moon with a tightening jaw and a weight in his chest that had nothing to do with the war waiting at dawn.

The dragon king’s disappearance throbbed at the back of his mind, a cold truth he did not have the luxury to confront: if Vaeronyx had gone searching for answers, then he feared the same thing Leroy did. The same fate. The same loss.

If not... had he abandoned them?

Morning broke too quickly.

As fog still clung to the plains, the Emperor of Vaeloria descended with his glittering army—thousands of spears glinting like a field of thorns, banners rippling proudly in the wind, arrogance radiating from every polished surface. He rode forward alone, dressed in crimson and gold, the colors of a crown he no longer deserved, and called out with a voice loud enough to scrape across both armies.

"Surrender!" Leroy ordered.

Only laughter echoed around. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"Where is your dragon now, Hostage Prince? Perhaps your so-called ally was nothing but a rumor, a bedtime tale you clung to in the mountains."

His soldiers laughed, loud and derisive.

Leroy’s expression didn’t so much as twitch; he only smirked, a quiet razor of a smile that unsettled even the kings standing behind him. If the Emperor noticed, he dismissed it, and gave the command to begin.

The war ignited like a storm striking a dry forest.

For three relentless days, steel clashed in tides that never seemed to ebb; armies collided and broke and collided again, and the kings of the North fought with the ferocity of men reclaiming the homeland they had lost. They wanted to rise up against this tyrant.

The plains churned into mud under thousands of trampling feet, horses cried out, shields splintered, and every breath tasted of iron and smoke.

Lorraine stayed where Leroy asked her to be—inside her tent, on the safer side of the battlefield, guarded by Aldric and her silent shinobi, though nothing about her felt safe. Through their bond, she felt Leroy as he pushed himself harder than any king had the right to, every sharp spike of fury when the enemy gained ground, and once, on the second afternoon, a sudden flare of pain that stole her breath and tightened her grip around her belly.

Aldric nearly tore through the tent flaps, thinking an enemy had gotten in, but Lorraine could only shake her head, her eyes wide with fear she refused to name.

By the third evening, exhaustion hung over the battlefield like a second dusk, and still neither side yielded. The sky glowed red from smoke and setting sun, and the plains trembled under the weight of marching men.

Then the trembling shifted—deeper, older, rolling through the earth itself.

It was the sound of wings.

One enormous shadow crossed the battlefield, blotting out the last light of day; flames curled across the clouds in a single sweeping arc of heat that made even the bravest soldiers falter. Vaeronyx did not strike the armies. He did not land. He did not need to.

The world remembered what it had forgotten.

And at dusk, the Emperor’s banner finally fell, mostly because his soldiers had lost their will to fight.

Leroy’s standard rose. And above them all, snapping in the resurrected wind of ancient glory, the banner of House Aurelthar unfurled for the first time in centuries... the dragon returned to the sky, and the fate of Veyrakar bent beneath its shadow once more.

Lorraine had drifted into sleep at last, exhaustion pulling her under like a soft tide, when the world around her shifted and she found herself once again standing at the Mirror Lake—a place she had not seen in visions for long, as if the future itself had been withholding its breath.

Yet this time, the lake was no longer the silent sheet of crystal it had always been; the stillness had shattered, replaced by rolling waves that crashed against the shore in a restless rhythm, and the air hummed with a tension that made her pulse quicken.

She stepped toward the water, the ripples pulling her attention to one distant corner of the lake where the surface bulged unnaturally, as though something beneath struggled to rise. She walked closer, each step echoing far too loudly, until the waves parted and revealed a structure that had never existed in any vision before—an exquisite tomb of pale marble, luminous even in the dream’s muted light, crowned by a statue of a swan with wings spread wide, as though guarding everything beneath.

The Swan Oracle’s tomb?

Lorraine’s breath caught, her heart pounding in a way that tasted like dread and revelation all at once. How can it appear out of nowhere? Why now?

As she stared, the sky above the lake began to fracture... hairline cracks at first, then spiderwebbing across the heavens with a sound like breaking glass. Light spilled through the fractures, cold and violent, and Lorraine felt the vision pulling at her, drawing her toward something she could not see but instinctively feared.

She tried to step closer. The lake surged forward, swallowing the tomb in a roar of water. Lorraine reached out...

...and woke with a sharp, gasping inhale, heart thundering, the tent spinning for a moment before everything snapped painfully back into reality.

She tried to close her eyes, desperate to return to the vision, to the tomb, to the answer that had slipped away like water through her fingers, but the world would not let her. A tight, breath-stealing pain seized her abdomen, sudden and unmistakable. Lorraine’s hands flew to her belly.

A contraction.

Too early. Weeks too early.

Her pulse trembled with fear she had not felt since the day she’d almost lost him. "No... not now..." she whispered, bending forward slightly as another wave of pain tightened around her ribs. She did not know if the baby would be safe. She did not know if this was fate, a warning, or a consequence.

Her vision flickered. Once again, the image of the tomb of the Swan Oracle flashed.

But then...

Leroy was kneeling in front of it, on his knees, crying. And beside him, was a baby... their baby.

Is that... my tomb?